engleski

The Croatian Ninth-Century Senmurv and Its Possible Ties to (East) Slavic Mythology

The opus of the workshop of The Master of the Zadar Ambos, active in the first decade of the ninth century in Northern Dalmatia, i. e. Zadar and its surroundings, contains, in contrast to most of the other workshops from the period, scenes that include (then very rare) human figure and a whole array of composite (hybrid) animals. In this paper, we discuss one of those composite animals – the senmurv, in the context of the overall opus of The Master of the Zadar Ambos. The senmurv is a creature with the head of a dog, protruding tongue, paws of a lion and tail of a bird. It is quite rare in early medieval sculpture, originates from the Iranian milieu and it was observed in Sasanian, Sogdian, early Islamic and Byzantine art and through Byzantines spread to the West. The motif usually appears on fabrics, plates and other portable objects so it was easily spread quite far from the area of its origin. The Master of the Zadar Ambos depicted them in two places, on a screen panel probably from the cathedral of Rab and on the screen panel also probably from the church of Saint Chrysogonus in Zadar. The reason why this motif appears on liturgical furniture and its meaning within the Christian context is still unresolved, but the overall curious choice of motifs of the Master, such as animals with phalluses, hunting scenes that can be interpreted as the Divine Battle between Perun and Veles, other examples of very rare composite animals for this period such as hippogriff, manticore and the quite peculiar unicorn prompted us to connect the meaning of our senmurv to the religious syncretism of Christian and pagan (Slavic) beliefs. To this, we add the established North-Iranian origins of the deities Khors and Simargl from the pantheon of prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich, especially Simargl, which has been identified as a borrowing of the Iraninan Senmurv (or Simurgh). Nevertheless, the function of Simargl remains unclear, as well as its iconography, since there is no agreement that he was depicted as a hybrid animal (as for example on the 12th- century capital in the church of Boris and Gleb in Chernigov) and that its depictions exist at all. However, the fact that the Iranian deity has infiltrated the pantheon of Prince Vladimir was enough for us to propose some conclusions regarding the religious syncretism in early medieval Dalmatia and the unusual frequency of senmurvs that appear here in the opus of a workshop that evidently has pagan background. Through our analysis of the iconographic programme of all the preserved fragments from the churches in which the workshop was employed, along with comparative analysis of similar examples from Dalmatia and abroad, we have uncovered that the commissioner definitely made a deliberate decision of including certain pagan elements into otherwise clearly Christian programme, probably to make them more receptive to the recently Christianized and partly still pagan community. This also explains why in Pridraga, in still unevenly Christianized hinterland, those elements are more visible, while in Zadar and Rab, towns with long Christian tradition, they are more subtle, and make way instead for creative interpretations of patristic literature and bestiaries.

senmurv, early medieval sculpture, Dalmatia, The Master of the Zadar Ambos, Zadar, Rab, Slavic mythology

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